A Country’s Out-of-Control Sprawl, Drawn by a Robot in Sand

At the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, a group of designers, architects, and artists created an installation of sand printers.Photo: Francesco Allegretto

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The printers were built specifically to trace patterns, representing Israel's out-of-control urban sprawl, in the sand.Photo: Francesco Allegretto

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Israel's population has grown tenfold in just 66 years, leading to what this group has coined the Urburb: neighborhoods that aren’t quite urban (they’re outside metropolitan areas) but not quite suburban (they lack the pockets of commercial businesses that define most suburbs).Photo: Francesco Allegretto

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The sprawl has created a commuter culture that’s bad for the environment: residents have to drive into the nearest city for practically everything—groceries, schools, entertainment, and so on—since commercial properties weren’t built into the neighborhoods.Photo: Francesco Allegretto

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The group hopes that their exhibit (and their research and work, which will be published in a book, The Urburb) will promote the idea that Israel's architects and urban planners could create more responsive neighborhoods in the future.Photo: Francesco Allegretto

The State of Israel was created in 1948, with a population of around 800,000. Today, 8 million people live there—a tenfold increase that happened over the course of just a few decades. That kind of growth sparks a ravenous demand for land and housing, and in Israel has led to a housing sprawl that a group of designers, architects, and artists have coined the Urburb: neighborhoods that aren’t quite urban (they’re outside metropolitan areas) but not quite suburban (they lack the pockets of commercial businesses that define most suburbs).

To convey the notion of the Urburb, this group—comprised of architect Ori Scialom, artist Keren Yeala-Golan, designer Edith Kofsky, and professor Roy Brand—created an installation at the Israeli Pavilion for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Inside the sunlit space, guests will find four large patches of sand. Atop each is a sand printer, a machine built by the group specifically to trace blueprints, Etch-a-Sketch-style, of Israeli neighborhoods into the sand. After the sand printer has drawn one plan, it wipes the sand clean and draws another. The four printers trace city plans of Jerusalem, Holon, Hadera and Yahud, and in succession, they show how Israel’s neighborhoods became what they are today.

“The show is about the reality of Israel today, in 2014. We’re showing how Israel looks today by looking back 100 years, to see how the architecture manifested itself,” says Yeala-Golan, one of the curators. “The neighborhoods are very generic. They look the same, and they are not interesting in terms of architecture.”

An Urban Plan Gone Awry

This wasn’t by design. In 1951, when the nation was still in its infancy, a Bauhaus-trained architect named Arieh Sharon created a housing plan for Israel that advocated a dispersed approach to development. Unfortunately for Sharon, people gravitated towards the coast, Israel saw an influx of immigrants, and the plan didn’t take. Units went up quickly to accommodate a booming population, without much regard to architectural integrity. (Yeala-Golan describes the residences as “cookie-cutter houses.”)

Lousy aesthetics aside, the sprawl has also created a commuter culture that’s bad for the environment: Residents have to drive into the nearest city for practically everything—groceries, schools, entertainment, and so on—since commercial properties weren’t built into the neighborhoods.

The Urburb installation is laden with symbolism, starting with the sand itself: The team imported pounds of it from the desert by the Dead Sea. In Hebrew, Yeala-Golan explains, the word sand means “secular,” or not holy, or not sacred—which is how they view the sundry of identical houses dotting the coastline. And, because sandcastles get swept up and erased by the tide (or razed), they stand for a perpetual clean slate.

“We would like the planners to see those neighborhoods and understand that they could do a better job, in terms of the environment and the people,” Yealla-Golan says. “They could make them more green, more ecological, in terms of bike lanes. There’s no commercial area, no entertainment. They could give them an opportunity to work there, or just to have coffee in their neighborhoods.”

The Biennale has ended, but the exhibit will remain up until November 23, 2014. The group’s research and work will also be published in a book, The Urburb.